Google AI Mode shows same products 21.6% more expensive than traditional search

They’re using “traditional search” to mean the shopping specific search widget or page, which is a separate feature from traditional search. It aggregates retailer listings and sorts them by price.

The AI mode is based on normal top search results, which are oriented toward information about the product like the manufacturer’s page, which is usually going to be full MSRP.

So technically correct that the AI mode is not using the price ranking from the separate shopping mode, but the intent of the AI mode is to find information about the search term first and prices second. The intent of shopping mode is to find lowest prices first and not find any information about the product at all.

In my experience, shopping mode will show a lot of low prices that I can’t actually get because when I get to checkout shipping is $10 higher than anywhere else for some inexplicable reason, or the Google listing was tricked into showing a coupon code that doesn’t work with some exclusion message at checkout. The worst are the sites that show Googlebot a lower price on the indexing pass but then charge regular customers full price when you get there.

In some product areas these tricks are so widespread that every vendor uses them. Search for contact lenses at the lowest price and every single website will have a low price indexed by Google but will add a checkout fee to bring the price back up to full at checkout to cancel out the discount.

I haven’t found shopping mode to actually save me any money other than in a few rare cases. Usually it just wastes my time.

I tried “mens cycling helmet specialized” via normal search and AI search.

On the surface, AI showed results of £45 while normal results showed £39.99 and this particular result didn’t show at all in the AI search, even when clicking more.

However, small fine print was the £39.99 had a £4.99 delivery. Can it be that AI is optimised for full price including shipping?

I wonder when dynamic pricing based on the users chat history will be a thing. The users context based of LLM conversation should be way more detailed compared to traditional cookie tracking. Also buyers manipulation could be done at some point. Pretty scary to think about

At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon.

Hey, that's actually a pretty useful feature if it helps discourage people from buying so much stuff!

I started to use TUIs to do this. Have them track "tracked" products in a local storage mechanism and otherwise browse the web as normal through a controlled browser. It's not optimal but it's the only way to have some control over what it's doing.

I’m building an agentic commerce platform where you can connect any model and the stores are served as MCP-UI components.

Finding the cheapest price for a product that isn’t fake is a completely unsolved problem and the entire premise of this is ridiculous

So are companies paying more to have products featured in AI mode rather than just plain search?

It sucks that Google seem to be phasing out plain search - for some specialized searches it ONLY gives me AI mode results, which are useless, and I have to go to Bing instead.

I would never use AI for shopping. The incentives to mess with the results for commercial gain are too great.

My guess is that there are two different teams working on these.

I've also had issues with severely out of date product results.

So Google is now a scammer - it scams elderly people for 21.6% higher cost, for the same product. Now we know how AI makes more revenue: it leeches off of people who don't know they are being scammed.

The solution is really easy (aside from having a government in the USA that stops milking the people - right now the orange clown is pocketing away money into his cronies, including Google and the other leeching US mega-corporations): Stop relying on Google. From A to Z.

I am aware that de-googling is very hard; I myself haven't yet completed that, but I also decided that eventually I will ban all of Google's impressive Evilness. Whenever an alternative exists that works at the least as well, I will use it.

I dislike when unjustifiable precision in a headline is used to try to give some credibility to a defective analysis.

I wish that purchase/shopping search engines were entirely separate and removed from general search engines. "are you searching for information or are you shopping?"

when I'm searching for information, so often results are just flooded with pricing from sellers.

Get ready for a tidal wave of plain old grass roots HN commenters who love paying 21.6% more.

It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem. Google product page was garbage even before AI, most aggregators are a complete farce as well, either displaying deals that are out of date or completely unrelated items, and let's not even get started with price tracking...

You'd think of all the companies, Google would be the best one to come up with a good solution for deal hunting but no...

I guess it's in no company's interest for consumers to get the best deals...

Am I the only one who's noticed "AI Mode" is dario's last name? A(mode)I?

Thank you for your time this evening.

That is interesting.

The next question I'd ask is what the quality / reliability signal looks like. It is entirely possible that the results differ, but the organic search results are SEO'd garbage that lead to knock-offs, fell-off-the-trucks, or refurbs-sold-as-new.

But nonetheless, the fact they differ at all is an intriguing result.

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